Our family have a small house at a fashionable place in North Carolina; the mother and eldest son go there for a part of February and March. They have a thousand acres and a comfortable house in the Adirondacks—the head of the family likes to shoot and fish. They have a place in the Berkshire Hills—but they do not go there now and they are thinking of selling it. The wife has an apartment in Paris. She must be sure of comfort when she goes over for her shopping. Every few years they take a big house in Mayfair for the season, and go on to Scotland for the shooting. Then there is the steam yacht, an ocean greyhound—last year it cost them sixty thousand dollars for maintenance, a few repairs and refittings. The grown son has persuaded his father to start a racing stable—a small one with fifteen or twenty thoroughbreds. His trainer costs him ten thousand dollars a year, and his jockey five thousand more, as a retaining fee. The father estimates the cost of this addition to the family expense at one hundred thousand dollars a year—he hopes this will include betting losses. The son has long had a string of polo ponies that costs, with all its embroideries, fifteen to twenty thousand a year.
Ten years ago this family had only a small house in town—small by comparison—and the beautiful palace on the Ocean Drive at Newport. But they do not feel that they are now extravagant. Wherever they go they find people of their own set and a good many “rank outsiders” doing the same things they are doing; and they find many doing things they would think far beyond their means.
For example, a man has just paid two hundred and eighty thousand dollars for a string of pearls for his wife. Our multi-millionaire regards that as an extravagance. He thinks his own wife’s string, which cost one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, represents the limit of prudent expenditure for such a purpose. And those of their friends whom they regard as comparatively poor—the people with from fifty to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year—are pushing them on by concentrating where they scatter. They meet different groups of these moderately rich people at different points in their annual round; and each group is living almost as well as, in some respects better than, they are at that particular point. True, So-and-So’s house in town is a trivial twenty-room affair on a side street, but his place in Newport (he concentrates upon it) is far finer than their Newport place. Smith is decently housed in town and at Newport, but lives in a tiny doll’s house in Curzon street during the London season. Jones is modest in America and England, but how he does blaze on the Riviera!
There must be no standing still. There must be progress. The standards, all the standards—house, dress, equipage, number and livery of servants, jewels, works of art, sports, gifts—are rising, rising, rising. Each year, more and ever more must be spent, unless one is to fall behind, lose one’s rank, be mingled with the crowd that is ever pressing on and trying to catch up.
In the neighborhood of these plutocrats and their parasites and imitators, struggling thus desperately in gaudiness, it is all but impossible not at times to fear that prosperity, concentrated prosperity, has killed Democracy, has killed the republic. Foreigners look at New York and the galaxy of rich cities eagerly imitating it, and shrug their shoulders and sneer. Americans look, and try to keep their courage and their point of view.
CHAPTER III
PLUTOCRACY AT HOME
Let us glance at our typical Mr. Multi-Millionaire’s town house. It is a palace of white marble, in Fifth avenue, near Fifty-ninth street—the view across the Park from the upper windows is superb. This palace was the inaugural of the family’s recent fashionable career. It is the struggle to live up to it that is making them famous in New York.
The palace was to have cost our family a million, including the site. Up to the present time it has cost them two and a half millions, and that does not include the one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollar set of tapestries for the dining-room which is on its way from Europe. The site cost half a million; the house three-quarters of a million; the rest went for furniture, and the house still looks bare to the family. “A wretched barn,” madame calls it. There are one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in paintings and statuary in the entrance-hall, fifty thousand dollars in paintings, statuary, and such matters in the rest of the house. Two hundred thousand dollars could easily be spent without overcrowding. The furniture, thinly scattered in the long and lofty salon, cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars—it is amazing how fast the money disappears once one goes in for old furniture.
As you look round these show rooms—the vast entrance-hall, the enormous dining-room, the great library, the salon which is used as ballroom, the comparatively small and exquisitely furnished reception-rooms—you are struck by the absence of individual taste. You are in a true palace—the dwelling-place, but in no sense the home, of people of great wealth, but of no marked æsthetic development. They have the money, and to a certain extent the faculty of appreciation. But others have supplied the active, the creative brains.